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FAQ: Is Aspire for me?

What is Aspire?

Aspire is a Mac OS X Leopard application to help you visually brainstorm, prioritize, review, refine, track and improve your life goals and long-term plans.

Who will Aspire help?

It will help people who are looking to improve and track their long-term goals and life plans. Long-term means months, years and longer. If you're looking for help with short-term (hourly, daily, weekly) planning and task management, Aspire isn't for you. If you're not prepared to do some serious thinking and self-examination about what you want out of life, again you should look elsewhere.

How will it help me?

It will help you initially develop your long-term plans, and track and improve them over time. It will provide a place to keep ideas until you're ready to use them. It will visually show you what you think is important. It will help you think about whether your daily busy-work is really supporting your life goals. Are you on track to achieve what you want? Are you wasting effort on unimportant things?

How would I use it?

Get started by building up an initial map of your goals, obstacles and possible solutions. Get a sense of what is important, and try to think through what should be tackled sooner and what should wait until a later stage in life. Periodically review and adjust this. Are your priorities changing? New goals? Should some things be dealt with earlier on? Have you recently made progress towards important goals? Aspire won't give you the answers, but it will grealy help you think through them.

Why goals but not tasks?

Day-to-day productivity is very important, no question. But in the rush to focus there we sometimes forget about the big picture — why we're doing those things in the first place. There are many applications and tools for day-to-day plans, but not long-term plans. If Aspire can help people think more about the long-term too, that's a good thing.

More practically (and even ignoring the multitude of task-based tools!), even the "solutions" in Aspire are usually big-picture projects on the scale of months and years long. They're not often a matter of completing a few small actionable tasks. Each solution may well be a major top-level project in your daily productivity tool, which needs to be broken down into subprojects, planned out, etc. While you're doing that, Aspire will be there to remind you not to lose sight of why you're doing that project in the first place.

FAQ: Why not use...?

... Nothing at all?

Most people don't consciously think through long-term plans, or just keep them in their head. Getting things out of your head makes them more concrete, easier to think about, and more visible. You're more likely to review those plans, and you won't have to try to remember what they are each time. Keeping things in your head also makes priorities and relationships harder to think about.

... Pencil and paper?

This is a very definite step up from not thinking about long-term plans, or just keeping them in your head! But as usual, doing things manually makes it harder to change, adjust priorities, and thereby really visualize. Especially since most people do this kind of thinking as a simple list. And obviously a software tool allows you to keep much more information (such as notes about each item) than would fit on a piece of paper.

... a mindmap tool?

In many ways, you could think of Aspire as a very-specialized mindmap tool. So while you could use a generic mindmap tool, it's like using Excel for your taxes instead of a dedicated tax application. In Aspire, you don't have to figure out representations for every concept, priorities and constraints between items are enforced by the system, etc. You can focus on your plans, and not how to make the tool do what you want it to do.

... iCal, OmniFocus, iGTD, ...?

These are all great tools, all worth looking at and using, and all really geared towards helping you with your day-to-day productivity. The value in Aspire is not in replacing those tools, but complementing them. Use both! Long-term plans mean nothing if you can't execute on them, and perfect execution doesn't help if you're not doing something meaningful to you.

FAQ: Getting Started

What are the system requirements?

Aspire requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or higher, on any PowerPC or Intel Mac. It will not run on Tiger or other earlier versions.

What restrictions are there on the demo?

When you first download Aspire, you'll be in "demo" mode, which will allow you to try out Aspire for a period of thirty days. To continue using it after the thirty day period requires a license. As well, during the demo period you'll be restricted to creating a maximum of fifty items (goals, obstacles, or solutions). We hope this demo period will provide you with enough information to decide if Aspire is right for you.

FAQ: Purchasing a License

How do I purchase a license?

Visit our online store, operated for us by Kagi. There you'll be able to securely enter your payment information. You'll then get sent a confirmation email from Kagi, as well as a separate email from us with your license key. In Aspire, choose "Licensing..." from the "Aspire" menu, and then "Enter License". Copy and paste the license key from your email into the license field.

What if I'm not happy?

We offer a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you purchase a license and within the first 30 days change your mind, just email us and we'll refund your payment. Of course, we encourage people to try out the demo before buying. Similarly, if you're running into problems, we hope you'll get in touch so we can help you resolve them.

What is your upgrade policy?

Your license purchase will cover you for all minor releases, (i.e. version 1.x). Upgrading to a new major version (i.e. 2.x) may require an upgrade fee.

FAQ: Downloads and Updates

How will I update to new versions?

Aspire will (with your permission) automatically check for updates, and if it finds one, ask you if you'd like to install it. You can control whether or not it checks for upgrades in the "Preferences" window.

What's changed in each version?

This web site includes a list of changes between all versions. As well, when it asks you if you'd like to update to a new version, Aspire will display the release notes for the version, showing what has changed.

What is the anonymous system profile?

When checking for updates, Aspire will optionally send information about your computer back to Unifiq. This system profile information does not in any way identify you personally, but does provide very useful information to us that helps guide future development. Again, you can control whether this information is sent or not via the "Preferences" window.